In Defense of Zizek

Josh Strawn has written an outstanding response to The New Republic hit piece on Jewcy.com.

Nowhere is the problem with Kirsch’s analysis more apparent than in his attacks on the recent book ‘Violence.’ He tells his readers that Zizek means to tell us that “resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence.” Not so. The author is very clear. He says that his intent is to expand our conceptual understanding of violence beyond it’s more obvious eruptions. He wants to explain violence not as merely the act of violence with which we’re most viscerally and morally aware (what he calls ‘subjective’ violence), but more thoroughly–as inclusive of the network of relations and circumstances that make that violence possible (he calls this ‘objective’ violence). Sure Zizek quotes Lenin’s directive to “Learn, learn, learn.” That doesn’t make him a Bolshevik.

One could, if one were so inclined, shockingly quote from ‘Violence,’ “while [terrorists] pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good.” There you have it ladies and gentlemen, Slavoj Zizek thinks that terrorism embodies the highest standard of the good. Fascist!! This is extremely easy to do, and it suggests the person doing so is only skimming to cherry-pick. More on “form” later, but the difference between an honest reader of Zizek and a detractor on a mission is that the reader would deal with what comes after. Namely, that this point is raised primarily to discuss what’s wrong with terrorism.

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5 Responses to “In Defense of Zizek”

Dr Sinthome, this discussion is YET AGAIN displacing the locus of controlae to where it shouldn’t be, which is endless solipsistic academism around dr. Zizek’s status – is he charming or not? Is he as charming as he says?
When do I get to fuck him? – and so on.

(What use is the outcome of this kerfuffle for those who should profit from it the most, that is to say, THE WORKERS?)

The fact is, that article, for all of its obvious faults, touched on a sensitive issue, already mentioned by the parody center in the Zack Snyder debates: Zizek’s fascism.

And now I relate back to your earlier question, are you not allowed, as in the case of Heidegger, to extract some good points from dr. Zizek’s work despite your disagreement with the doctor’s political agenda.

You are OF COURSE allowed to do that, but the thing is, due to your lack of culture-specific information, you don’t understand just how intimately related dr. Zizek’s theoretical points are with his politics so that it’s really impossible to distinguish between the two.

Both dr. Zizek’s methodology of endlessly shifting perspective, displacing the petit objet a, as you described, and his implicit attempt, which you also described, to place himself in the role of the Master discourse, extend directly from the policies of dr. Zizek’s own (disavowed) Master signifier, Marshall Josip Broz Tito.

Through a system best described as soft totalitarianism, which was the former Yugoslavia, Tito strived to one the one hand ”decentralize power” (evident in his break with Stalin’s totalizing policies, which afforded Yugoslavia the non-aligned status, and in his pivotal role in the establishment of the United Nations) and to on the other hand assert totalitarian control over the entire country, which even resulted in full-scale social engineering projects such as the creation of new nations, republics and other such Communist entitites, as well as the presence of Gulag and Guantanamo Bay like prisons – The Naked Island, for example, where dissenters against Tito were sent to labor in horrible conditions.

Dr. Zizek’s act is an almost-identical replica of Josip Broz Tito, and as Shaviro tried to enlighten you, this is the reason you will NEVER read anything about Tito in Zizek’s output.

The disclosure of Tito’s totalitarian policies would completely annihilate Zizek and his entire project.

But specifically it would reveal that the supposedly non-aligned, egalitarian and Communist constitution of Yugoslavia, created by the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, actually fostered favorist policies towards its Western-oriented republics, those who were more willing and ready to accept the dictate of capitalism, and this I mean directly, economically, financially as well as in (covert) ideological terms.

What is specifically fascist about this project is the close link between Slovene nationalism, embraced in ”PoMo” fashion by Zizek, and the Christian-Lacanian tropes in Zizek’s discourse (such as the dismissal of homosexuality as pathological narcissism) affording the white supremacist – as opposed to the threatening Balkan-Orthodox Other. Clearly the slovenly doctor still sees his little Heimat as a superior Volk whose mission it has been, and remains, to enlighten the backward Yugoslavia (and now also, it seems, the backward West).

Addendum: you say that the positive thing about Zizek’s shenanigans is that they draw the attention to the chessboard upon which the game is being played; I would say precisely the opposite is true – if Zizek was ever honest about the Yugoslav case, the world would have the unique opportunity to learn from Yugoslavia’s mistakes, because all of the current crises draw its origins from THERE, from the period in which Tito co-established the foundations of the UN and all these supranational bodies, with their currently operative systems of softly fascist control (what Deleuze describes in ”Control Society”).

affording the white supremacist – as opposed to the threatening Balkan-Orthodox Other, the Muslim and the Gypsy – the status of the superior one; that this is delivered with self-referential humor doesn’t make it any less racist, fascist and shitty.

The fact that it’s even a point of contention whether or not Zizek is a petit bourgeois Christo-Fascist, as you make him out to be, or a Marxist, I think points to the fact that in some way Zizek has succeeded at his task.

Bryan maybe this sort of a formulation will make it clearer for you:
in supporting figures like Zizek, and it’s you, not me, who’s paying him to lie, the American and British intellectual elite is a COLLABORATOR with 1) capitalism and 2) imperialism. This would make any further discussion of Marxism on your side quite superfluous. Anyhow the only reason I even invest any effort in this debate is that I sort of like dr. Sinthome’s earnestness. For the rest it mostly just makes me sick.